Grocery Shopping with a Madman

As I try to pull myself out of the winter doldrums I took some friendly advice from Ed. Well, at least I took part of his advice.

Yesterday he left this helpful comment:

If you have the winter doldrums, why not take a ride to the Asian Supermarket and pick up some Asian vegis and make a nice stir fry. They usually have duck legs there which cook up very nicely. You could also pick up a piece of frozen Unagi (fresh water barbecued eel) and make a cucumber salad with seasoned rice vinegar. Winter, even without snow, is a tough time to find variety but you can get some interesting things. Oh, and don’t forget the beech mushrooms.

One of these days I’m just going to snap. There are too many rules and restrictions governing the behavior in my head. I’ll detail in just a moment why I couldn’t take Ed up on the details of his plan, but I did drag myself out to the Asian Supermarket and the Honest Weight Food Co-op. Honestly, I think it helped.

Now what follows is either dangerously honest or incredibly self-indulgent. But it chronicles how I think about food and the conflicts that arise from even the most seemingly benign decisions at a grocery store.

I can’t buy veggies at the Asian Supermarket. I just can’t bring myself to do it. Primarily it has to do with packaging. So much of the produce comes on Styrofoam trays and is wrapped in plastic wrap. I find the waste to be appalling, so I try to pretend the entire section of the store doesn’t exist.

Ed’s suggestion of duck legs sounds delicious, but sadly they are not on the diet for the next few months. Unagi, is also a tasty treat, but there are several reasons to avoid eel entirely or at the very least to eat it just one time per year.

But I did need some specialty items at the Asian market, so I saddled up.

Tofu. No, it’s not exactly a specialty item, but I only buy it at Asian markets because it’s a fraction of the price there in comparison to our local supermarkets. I buy the American stuff that’s made from non-GMO soybeans. I know soy has its detractors, but we eat it in moderation. Which is not to say that I’m thrilled the package sizes have been decreasing over the past several months. Man, that makes me angry.

Peanut oil. I was just about out of my three-liter jug of Lion & Globe peanut oil. This stuff is special because it hasn’t been filtered to the point of tasting like nothing. It actually retains a lot of its peanut flavor. Despite my love for the stuff, I hesitate. Surely this oil is chemically extracted. If it were expeller pressed, they would put that on the label and charge three times as much for the product. Then I glanced at its clear hard plastic bottle, and silently acknowledged that it was probably made with BPA. But we use so little of it at a time, and it’s so delicious, that I put it in my basket.

Sweet potato noodles. I’m going through a little Korean phase right now. And Mrs. Fussy will be away for a few days, which makes the temperature around the household perfect for some perversion of chapchae. There are a ton of sweet potato starch noodles, many of them with Korean writing on the bag. But most of them come from mainland China. I wanted Korean noodles that were actually Korean. After manhandling several bags and carefully reading their labels, I finally found one.

Buying a replacement half-gallon jug of kimchi was a no-brainer. Then it was off to the Honest Weight Food Co-op, where things can get interesting.

Vegetables. There are many great items there one can buy without issue, especially if you miss them at a local farmers market. Like organic red beets (choose the smaller ones if you like them sweet). I also picked up a five-pound bag of organic carrots and a couple of organic green peppers. Mind you, all these things are important to buy organic.

Sweet potatoes. You know, Shop Rite had organic sweet potatoes recently. And I only started buying organic sweet potatoes because of the web video promoted by the HWFC. Except the co-op didn’t stock any. They only had these monstrous conventionally-produced things that are surely fibrous and overgrown. What the hell?

Chocolate. On the plus side I found a treasure trove of fair-trade dark chocolate bars. I bought four different brands, and you can look forward to a cross comparison of these in the future. This was very exciting, because in my new obsession with healthful eating, dark chocolate is one of my greatest pleasures. However, I’ve decided to stop eating chocolate that is produced without regard for the welfare of children who are used to harvest the cocoa. Sadly, that’s most chocolate. Although oddly I’m still okay with using my iPhone and wearing clothes made and manufactured all around the world.

Safflower oil. As if to make up for the mega-bottle of peanut oil, I picked up its polar opposite: Expeller-pressed safflower oil in a glass bottle. I was actually struggling between that and the organic canola oil, and couldn’t justify the extra few bucks to support those canola growers who are resisting Monsanto’s canola monoculture.

And if all this seems nuts, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. You should hear what goes through my head in Walmart.

But the upside was that it was indeed very restorative. My pantry is restocked. I’m ready to make the next batch of mushroom barley soup. I might make my own granola. Milk liqueur is in my sights. The next batch of chicken stock can begin. And let’s not forget the chocolate tasting. Thanks Ed.